If people have been following the story line of the ABC series “Scandal”, one of the plots was the substitution of preprogrammed chips, intended to register the tally of votes electronically while providing a printout to the voter, that declared an extraordinarily high count for one candidate over the other. The printout registered what the voter had actually had selected, while the tally was skewed for a different candidate.

One suspects a similar fraud took place in a number of districts where ordinarily, Republicans would be fully competitive, but some mysteriously large margins were recorded that did not square with numbers of each bloc of voters.

Unless such fraud is detected and widely exposed, this has just become the new normal for elections.

But of course, that is just silly, and “couldn’t happen” here.

No conspiracy. Because if conspiracy does not exist everywhere, it exists nowhere.

Oh, on Plan B - like yeah, the GOP could work very, very hard to win control of the Senate and increase their hold on the House.

Instead, the GOP has long been a toothless, not-even paper anything. It is far less than a herd of cats and "wicked awesome" in need of a serious culling.

Effective counters to divide-and-conquer tactics should have been learned on the playground. For the GOP - not.

The joy of internecine self-destruction is a very old and practiced GOP art form. They cannot even "buy" a clue.

To govern is not to be liked. Tough - get over it.

Stall, deny, delay, ... and wait for the next time is just stupid.

An idea - today, freeze all government spending at their current levels. Period. No if's or and's or but's. Next, moving forward, in quarterly increments, reduce spending by 1% each quarter, and continue until there is a "real" (versus "smoke-and-mirrors") balanced budget.